by Robin Green
At lunch, he gave us a two-page, single-spaced typed description of the show and its characters: a widower chief of police in a big East Coast city to be determined by us; his father (a former chief), who lived with him; and his three kids, a hotheaded detective, a newly minted beat cop, and a DA daughter. There would be a crime to solve each week along with family stories and the set piece of a Sunday family dinner at the police chief’s house.
We placed the show in New York, where we lived, and met with Leonard a few more times to flesh out our pitch and then took it to CBS. I was to do the talking, but strangely it was Leonard who seemed nervous as we waited for the executives to call us in. I had actually discovered a talent in myself for pitching—I proved to be, after all, my salesman father’s daughter, especially when I felt sure of a project and enthusiastic about it, which I now was.
The pitch went well. We wrote the pilot script with Leonard’s, Paramount’s, and CBS’s notes. One thing that never changed, though, not one word, was the nine-page family dinner, a very long scene for TV and the most fun for us to write.
The show was Blue Bloods and, if not a critical darling, it was always first for viewers in the ratings, doubling CBS numbers in that Friday-night time slot, which had until then been moribund at five million. Our pilot script attracted Tom Selleck back to series television and he is greatly responsible for the show’s success, though he is also greatly responsible for Mitch and my demise as executive producers after the first year. From the minute he walked into the conference room at CAA to meet us, all looming six foot four inches of him, it was no longer our show, but his. Leonard knew it and it was fine with him, but it wasn’t what I’d had in mind and I couldn’t live with it.
* * *
Chapter Twenty
RIP
My mother was born on an unlucky Friday the thirteenth in 1917, a month premature. Because her mother had already had a stillbirth and a preemie who’d died, she put this puny new child aside to die too until a neighbor lady came into the kitchen, saw the wailing infant, put her finger in the baby’s mouth, and, when the child began to suck voraciously, declared, “This baby is hungry!” And, the story went, my mother hadn’t missed a meal since.
I wrote a little play of this scene that was performed by my mother’s great-grandsons on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday in a party tent set up in my brother’s backyard in New Hampshire. I’d brought her friends Gloria, Dottie, and Ruth up from Providence in a rented stretch limo for the occasion (Ronnie’s mother, Pearl, was now locked up in an Alzheimer’s ward), and my mother’s two middle-aged nieces, one with a husband, came to the celebration too. My brother, Ron, was there, of course, and so was his wife, Sue; their grown children, Becky and Jordy; Jordy’s wife, Mandy; and my mother’s five great-grandsons. We’d hung the tent walls with blowups of photographs from my mother’s long life.
You’d think from all the hoopla that this was a mother whose children loved her, wouldn’t you? But we didn’t. Not completely. Maybe not at all. Or maybe just a little, because we loved her enough not to tell her that we didn’t love her. Or would it have been more an act of love to have leveled with her instead of perpetuating this charade and its concomitant resentment?
My mother was living in New Hampshire by then. She’d managed life in the house on Wayland Avenue the twenty years since my father died, each day spent mostly on the phone with her friends (one day a week for an hour with me) until it was time to fix herself lunch and, later, dinner. She’d tell me how lonely she was, how she’d taken her toasted cheese sandwich to eat by the dining-room window because she’d seen a squirrel munching an acorn under the tree outside to keep her company.
I was living in Los Angeles then, so it was left to my brother and his wife to look after her, to drive the three-plus hours down when she had a health scare or needed care, needs that arose, in time, with greater frequency. And the house, with its old boiler and disintegrating window frames, was becoming harder to maintain, so even she recognized, if reluctantly, that her position there would soon be untenable. I gave her a narrative that eased her transition out, a story she could tell herself and her friends: she had raised a family in that happy little house and now it was time to give another young family a chance.
On a visit east, I took her for a tour of Laurelmead, a posh “active senior living” community on twenty-three manicured acres on Blackstone Boulevard in Providence, where I wanted to buy her an apartment. The place looked great—river views, a lovely dining room, cleaning services, a gym, transportation to and from doctor visits—and many of her East Side Providence Jewish friends were moving there.
Not her. She didn’t have the right clothes for Laurelmead, one sometime bridge partner had been nasty enough to tell her, and it was true that my mother’s non-beauty-parlor hair, faded jeans, and denim shirt really wouldn’t cut it there. When I offered to buy her clothes, she scoffed at the idea, and I understood—she’d already fought the East Side Jewish status wars; she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life worrying about being popular in the dining room and at bridge.
She elected instead to move to Hanover, New Hampshire, to be near my-brother-the-doctor and Sue, first in a nice apartment they found for her to rent, then in a condo Mitch and I bought for her with the attached garage she required, and then, at age ninety-one, when even the condo became untenable for her, at Wheelock Terrace (these names, right?), an assisted-living facility that, with its white clapboard and green shutters, resembled a New England inn. “Death’s waiting room,” she wryly called it. She hated it there—the food, the people, the fact of a locked Alzheimer’s ward on the ground floor.
She did allow that she liked her little suite for which I’d done a diagram so the furniture we’d had moved from Providence, to the apartment, to the condo, and now here could fit. It looked like Wayland Avenue in miniature—her treasured antique English breakfront, the tall, handsome bar where my father had mixed so many cocktails, the small Early American kitchen table and chairs where she’d eaten her breakfast and ate it now, and the chintz love seat and matching couch, the very couch on one end of which my father had endured his final months downstairs. She admitted it pleased her when the staff brought by prospective “inmates,” as she called them, to see how nice the apartments could be.
Still, and though she never said it outright, we all sensed she wanted to move in with my brother and Sue. It would mean the end to the loneliness she’d suffered all these years and especially here in New Hampshire, where she’d waited at the rented apartment, then the condo, then at assisted living for what she felt were my brother’s all-too-infrequent visits.
“I’m hungry for you,” she’d say when she finally couldn’t keep herself from calling him.
Back when she still lived in Providence, she was diagnosed with colon cancer at eighty-two and stayed at my brother and Sue’s house for a monthlong course of pre-op chemo and radiation at the hospital where my brother practiced and taught medicine. The day after The Sopranos premiere, I rented a sturdy SUV, drove up, and stayed there too, ferrying her through snow and ice to and from her hours of treatment. As the weeks wore on, Sue spent most evenings upstairs, leaving my brother and me stuck with our mother.
What crimes had my mother committed that she was so avoided? Why did we feel so compelled to hold her at arm’s length? Was it her insatiable need for us? That we’d always feel her waiting, longing? That whatever we did, it would never be enough? Is that what my father had meant when, from his hospital bed after his heart attack had spared him an orchiectomy, he’d said to her, “I never loved you enough”?
She told me that when she’d asked him what he meant by that, he said he didn’t know, and the question remained unanswered. Was it like that song of regret Willie Nelson sings, a man who realizes he could have been more generous with his love? Or was it what we all seemed to feel about my mother, that for self-preservation, it was necessary to hold ourselves back to keep from disappearing into what seemed
a black hole of need?
Not long before what would turn out to be her end, I’d spend time lazing around with my mother in the bedroom of her small apartment in assisted living.
“I wasn’t very nice to Nana,” she said in a ruminative mood one afternoon, Nana being my father’s mother. “Maybe I should have been nicer.” I suspected she was thinking about my brother’s wife, how my mother’s treatment of her own mother-in-law might be karma coming back to bite her in the ass, a suspicion confirmed when, in what seemed like a fishing expedition, she later said, “Sue must love me very much to want me to move up here near her…”
We were lounging on the double bed in which she and my father had slept, nestled like spoons, for forty-three years, in which the whole family had cuddled and watched late-night TV, the bed in which my father had died and in which she would soon die too.
I was lying with my head propped up on pillows at the foot of the bed facing her when she said that, about Sue loving her very much. There was a silence. Here was my chance to tell her the truth—she’d always said she wanted the truth, that she herself was honest to a fault. “I don’t play games” was one of her favorite sayings.
Oh yeah? Well, here would be match, point, and game if I said, Actually, she doesn’t love you very much at all. They wanted you up here because Sue didn’t like her husband driving through snow and sleet for three and a half hours every time you had a hangnail, and he didn’t like it either—that’s why you’re here.
Instead, I smiled and said, “Yeah, she really must.”
Mitch and I were in Toronto filming the interior scenes for the pilot of Blue Bloods on stages there, and when we returned from dinner to our rooms at the original Four Seasons Hotel (since torn down), the phone rang. It was a friend of David Leach’s—the same friend in whose garage room I’d lived—calling to tell me that David had died that day, a heart attack, age sixty-five. As shocking as it was, as death always is, an unopenable door slammed shut in your face, it was hardly a surprise. David, with all his excesses, had been a poster child for heart disease.
The year was 2010, but it was seven years before I found myself in the Bay Area and could pay a visit to my old boyfriend’s widow. I had called and asked if David had kept any photographs of the time we were together, and when I got to the house in the Berkeley Hills, she had waiting for me an artsy shopping bag containing two eight-by-ten orange cardboard Agfa-Gevaert Brovira photography-paper boxes that, when I got back to my hotel room, proved to be filled with prints, contact sheets, negatives, and a folder with pages of color slides in plastic sleeves, all of them marked with subject and date in David Leach’s familiar scrawl.
His handwriting and the orange cardboard boxes brought him acutely back to me along with the autumn, winter, and spring nights we spent holed up in his Hyde Park apartment in 1968, both of us stoned on pot, me on the bed that doubled as a couch listening to music, studying liner notes on the album covers, while ten feet away, David spent hours and hours in a darkroom in the closet that had been the then-fledgling photographer Danny Lyon’s darkroom before David moved in, the same photographer who had since become famous in the art world and spent a night with me on Tamalpais Road.
I could almost smell the chemical stench from trays of developer, fixer, and stop bath, see David standing over them with tongs as I watched with him the miraculous emergence of images in the bath in the dim red light of the darkroom when I went in to say good night. I had to go to bed and get up early for my job at the University of Chicago, where I answered the phone for George Shultz—yes, Reagan’s future secretary of state, then dean of Chicago’s graduate school of business, though he was always off somewhere and if I met him, I don’t remember it.
In my hotel room years later, looking through the contents of the orange boxes, I could see the evidence of all those hours and hours of tinkering—sometimes a dozen prints of the same thing, the differences undetectable, to me at least. And these were only the prints he’d kept.
But there I was in the photographs, young and also naked in his camera’s eye much of the time. Spread before me on the hotel bed was a visual record of who I’ve said I was in those pre–Rolling Stone years, me staring up from under my bangs or with my head tilted to the side, wearing expressions I’m sure were meant to be coquettish. I may have been naked, but the photos themselves reveal nothing of the person I was beyond an (admittedly) beautiful object. Possibly because at that point, there was nothing, or little, to reveal.
I am pictured here. I am pictured there. I am nowhere.
And David? What did it mean that there were so many photographs, all these and also in the boxes and boxes collecting mildew in the basement of the house in the Berkeley Hills? Had photography been more than something he was merely “into”? Had he been an artist after all? But if he hadn’t claimed or owned or professed such a vocation or ambition, was he? It might have made him feel better about himself if he’d let himself think that’s what he was or wanted to be. But did it matter, now that he was dead?
When we were much younger and still lived in Providence, David’s father, Jonah, telephoned me one morning.
“I want to talk to you,” he said in his thick Russian accent. “I’ll be in the parking lot behind the slaughterhouse, ten o’clock.”
Jonah Leach had immigrated to the United States in the beginning of the twentieth century. He’d gone to Chicago, where he peddled boxes of strawberries on downtown street corners, and he could still tell you what they cost him and what he sold them for. Soon, he found work in the stockyards. There were photos of him on horseback among the cattle. In time, he owned a cattle slaughterhouse in Providence, which he eventually deeded over to David’s twenty-five-years-older porcine half brother Maurice, who converted it into one that slaughtered pigs.
When I drove in, Jonah was already waiting in his Caddy and waved me into the passenger seat. I knew I shouldn’t be here. I knew David wouldn’t like it, that I was betraying him somehow. But I was curious. And flattered. It made me feel important to be summoned to the parking lot of a pig slaughterhouse by a seventy-some-year-old Russian-immigrant millionaire.
Looking out the windshield, I could see a long line of fattened pink pigs being prodded up ramps to a third-floor kill room, whence gravity would do the rest as they were processed, pieces of them making their way down to be packaged and sold.
“Tell me,” Jonah said once I’d settled, “what’s the matter with David? What’s the matter with my son?”
What could I say? That I suspected David was ruined and that Jonah himself had ruined him, that he was too critical of him, too competitive with him, but that he’d also spoiled him, given him too much money, cars, freedom?
“There’s nothing wrong with David,” I said. “He’s fine.” And that was the end of it.
As I continued looking through the photos that night in my hotel room, I came across the few of David himself, ones I might even have taken, though I had no memory of having done so. He looked so sweet and vulnerable. And attractive. And I remembered that I loved him all over again.
I had at home another photo from those days that delivered a similar message, a snapshot my brother and Sue had sent me when I told them David had died, one taken at their old house in Vermont in 1970. In it, David and I sit across from each other at a chessboard. He’s smoking his pipe. Both of us are smiling. You can see in the snapshot more of who I was in those days: a goofy, happy, possibly stoned young girl. And if you didn’t know what a sexual fake I was then, a girl very much in love.
My mother died the Tuesday before Thanksgiving 2011, at ninety-four. Though her brain had remained sharp, her body had been in slow decline. She’d shrunk from a model’s height of five nine to five three, her spine fracturing and collapsing into itself over time, her frame gradually bending so that near the end as she walked, her gaze was directed to the floor. Her heart function had slowed to the point that doctors were at a loss to explain how that exhausted organ kept her going
. Those last few years, I tried to do my part, to spell my brother in service of her. Mitch and I had sold the LA house by then and lived full-time in New York and we’d drive up often, renting homes nearby for long stays when we had time off, all so we could visit her, take her out to dinner, take her shopping for shoes, clothes, makeup, shampoo, and toilet paper, and drive her for a day to my brother and Sue’s new place, a Charles Platt estate of twenty-seven acres south of Hanover, New Hampshire.
I tried to be patient and kind—until the day I wasn’t, two weeks before her death, when my anger and resentment surfaced. We were on the phone, talking about Thanksgiving. I’d volunteered myself and Mitch to come up and be with her so my brother and Sue would be free to drive to Virginia and spend the holiday with their recently divorced daughter and her two boys.
My mother had nixed Thanksgiving dinner at Wheelock Terrace, even the catered one I proposed in the lovely private dining room there, wanting instead to go to the new hotel in town, since the relatively charming Hanover Inn was closed for remodeling.
“It will be so much fun!” she said.
“Fun?” I said. “What are you talking about? What are you even doing, Mom?” Thinking only of my importuned self, picturing a grim meal, the three of us in the stark, sterile restaurant of the new hotel, me fearing another bathroom emergency or reeking mishap such as one that past July that I’d handed off to my brother. Apparently, my mother wasn’t the only one who didn’t “do shit.”
“It will be fun for me!” she snarled. “I’ve got to get out of here!”
I realized at once I had poisoned everything, ruined any possibility of enjoyment, not to mention blown my whole volunteer/martyr bit. But the cat was out of the bag.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said.